


Antelbellum (the work of love)

by myhappyface



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-17
Updated: 2010-11-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 06:22:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhappyface/pseuds/myhappyface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five visits Angel never receives at the Hyperion in 1952, or: a story about names.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antelbellum (the work of love)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kita. Beta by carlyinrome, who is on record as being the bestest.

_**BETHANY:** Great, I've stabbed an angel. Now I'm really never getting into heaven.  
 **ANGEL:** I'm not an angel. It's just a name. --2x04, "Untouched."_

0.

A month after his birth, when his parents are assured that he will not die in his sleep, as the one who had gone before him had, he is baptized. They call him Liam, for his father's father, a successful merchant and the patriarch of their family. His mother miscarries three times, afterward, and years after his father began to despair of him ever becoming a man, thinking him too flighty even for a boy, she becomes pregnant once more, and carries to term. He knows his father wishes for a true son, and Liam takes a special delight when his sister is born.

The night he rises, he has a terrible dilemma, and cannot decide whether to kill her in front of their father or to save her for last. He makes the best of it, though. Darla dips her pale hand into the blood pooled at the cup of Kathy's throat and licks her fingers, one by one. Nectar, she calls it. All that potential, pouring out onto lace-front church clothes, a honeyed taste of immortality.

Darla runs a bloodied finger across his forehead and he twitches away, in annoyance and fear. She catches his chin and turns him to face her; he imagines he can smell rot on her lips, but it is only his fancy. She smells of perfume and silk.

"The holy ghost," she says.

1.

He is smoking in the stairwell, too hungry to go outside, when the door opens and the actor's trick rushes through it. Thin walls make for well-informed neighbors; Angelus' excellent hearing means that he is never bored, or rather that he is always bored but never alone.

The man is slimly built and his face is flushed, as if he had just fed, although Angelus can tell by the smell of him that he's human. The flickering light of the stairwell casts him in shadow, and his sallow cheekbones remind him of Drusilla's boy, always moving, always changing. The man smiles at him a little, but his composure is shaken, and his hands when he lifts the cigarette to his mouth are unsteady.

"Jack," he offers.

"Sure," Angelus says. It's the first time he's spoken in a month. The sudden flare of warmth at his finger reminds him to stub out the cigarette, and when he makes his way up the stairs and back to his room, Jack follows him.

It's four-thirty in the morning, and his bed is still made from the cleaning service the day before. Jack looks curious but unafraid. That won't last long.

2.

He feeds less often than he should, which is how Lawson gets the drop on him. A trip to the butcher's every other week, the walk something to fill the dark hours until he can sleep again, and a bottle of blood on ice, the taste of it pooling heavy and dead around his tongue. Lawson rolls the bottle between his palms. Angelus can hear the blood move, sluggishly, against the glass; it's impossible to think it was ever alive.

"How does this taste?" Lawson asks. "For the sake of comparison, I mean. Is it like reheated lasagna, or is the flavor all in the squirming?"

"Try it yourself and find out," Angelus replies, supine on the bed. His head hurts: if he were human, it would have been a killing blow; as it is, he could still fight, probably. He's just not sure it would be worth the effort.

There is a small, hollow _clink_ as Lawson puts the bottle back into its ice bucket, and then he is above Angelus, one hand on his shoulder, pinning him down. The other he brushes against Angelus' temple, through the blood gathered there, and licks it away, almost thoughtfully.

"How do you live," Lawson asks, and that is all Angelus cares to remember.

3.

He feels an itch in his teeth that he can't distinguish, at first, from the frustrated urge to bite, now his constant companion. It lasts for days, though, creeping through the numbness he builds with too little food and too much sleep. He smokes on the patio in the early hours of the morning, feeling the temperature rise, waiting to go in until his flesh begins to warm.

One night, he catches the scent of dead rats by his door, and the next night the Parisian perfume Darla preferred when he last saw her, in China. This time he'll kill her, he thinks. This time she will let him stay. This time will be _different_. He knows, now, how long eternity is ( _the time between each empty feeding and the next_ ); he'll kill a priest, if that's what she wants. He'll kill a hundred of them. The whirlwind.

He waits, but she never comes.

4.

He sits in the back with his cigarettes, watching the movie. Tedious propaganda, a vestige of the last World War, preparation for the next. A GI, blond and forthright, speaks directly to the audience: We can't do it without you. On film, the sun is steadily rising over the countryside. He's seen this one twice before.

As the rest of the audience leaves, a young woman he recognizes as his new neighbor comes up to him. She's pretty quiet, usually, but sometimes he hears her crying. Her hands are a nervous tangle at her stomach.

"Can I have one of those?" she asks, perching on the edge of the seat beside him, face a strange twist of apprehension and hope. After more than a cigarette, then. He lights it for her and she smiles, exhales her real request with the smoke.

"Look, I, I don't mean to be a bother, you've already been so nice to me, but do you think you could walk me back to my hotel? It's only a few blocks away, and I think, I think someone is _following_ me, it feels like someone's watching me all the time, so if you. . . I mean, could you?" She's been biting at her bottom lip, working up to it: he can see the smudges in her lipstick, the pale flush of skin beneath the paint. Very suddenly, he feels hungry.

They stand and walk out together into the darkness.

5.

He comes in from his last cigarette, his mouth dry. The day is beginning. On his neatly-made bed sits a man, long dead. He appears unarmed, but that means very little.

"How rude of you to keep a guest waiting, Angelus," Holtz says. "Why don't you have a seat?"


End file.
